‘This is the world in which I
move uninvited, profane on a sacred land, neither me nor mine, but me
nonetheless.’
––Trinh
T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other
I am a private person. When I
come across something (or someone) that makes me go soft and raw in a new (or
old) way, I try to preserve its significance by keeping it a secret. Sometimes
it feels like I must keep everything I cherish in my fist or it will inevitably
escape and dissipate. But to be here, to be given license to publicly demarcate
myself, feels rare and the only way I feel I should make use of it is to tell
you of a writer for whom I have an inexorable and tender love.
‘Somewhere in the process the
flowers wither and the whole world smells of open wounds.’
Sometimes my own diasporic
genealogy is too close to actively engage with. And so I look outward to a
figure who shares a similar lineage, whose writing dwells within my palms and
in my shoulders every day: Trinh T. Minh-ha.
‘Speaking, writing, and
discoursing are not mere acts of communication; they are above all acts of
compulsion. Please follow me. Trust me, for deep feeling and understanding
require total commitment.’
Minh-ha, I trust her. Weaving in
and out of the lyrical and theoretical, she writes from the intersection of
various forms and fields; poetry, theory, auto-ethnography, postcoloniality,
and feminism. She writes in a way that makes you feel like she is talking to
you and you alone. Sometimes moving between the I and the you voices without giving any notice, she
invites you into a kind of intimate dialogue. Before you know it you are
swimming in her lyricism with, every now and then, a point made so sharply that
it holds you afloat.
‘…this sense of traveling, of
wandering, and of not fitting comfortably in one group, it’s not so much
something that constitutes an agenda on my part as something rather intuitive
that corresponds to the way I live, to the skills I’ve had to develop, and to
my own sense of identity.’
In her book Woman,
Native, Other, Minh-ha thanks ‘all the women… whose spoken words
and writings have allowed [her] story to shift, grow, and circulate.’ To
recognise the labour that has made her own possible is a crucially feminist
gesture; to fail to do so is an act of erasure. Elevating the voices of colour
around her (specifically black and Indigenous voices) is something she does in
every text I’ve read of hers, and it is something for me to emulate.
‘I write to show myself showing people
who show me my own showing.’
My Vietnameseness has always been
something to reconcile. In retrospect, I felt this every day in school, but
only in the past twelve months did it become a conscious kind of pulling.
What caused this was my tuning into the idea of whiteness and how difficult it
is to dislodge myself out from under it. Whiteness, to me, is unforgiving and
unmalleable and an arduous thing to be asked to embody. But Minh-ha has opened
up the possibility for me to write it through and, within that writing, find a
way to embody not whiteness but my difference to it.
‘…you and I are close, we
intertwine; you may stand on the other side of the hill once in awhile, but you
may also be me while remaining what you are and what I am not.’
I had very little sense of a
Vietnamese futurity for myself until I learned of Minh-ha. She has shown me
that writing can be a commitment to tenderness, and a commitment to
self-preservation. Her words have given me room to locate myself within, making
me feel simultaneously porous and steeled.
‘Words, fragments, and lines that
I love for no reason; blanks, lapses, and silences that settle in like gaps of
fresh air as soon as the inked space smells stuffy.’
P.S. I write best when I have an
addressee and so I write this for my sister, whose own complex relationship
with Vietnameseness feels inextricably linked to mine.
Nam-Chi
Tran is a writer and artist. They are currently based in Narrm
Melbourne.
photo licensed under Creative Commons.
photo licensed under Creative Commons.
